Why the New Memos Matter

It's a sad litany of excuses Howard Kurtz pries out of the editors of mainstream newspapers as to why they gave the original Downing Street Memo such cursory, if any, attention. My favorite is Tim Russert's, who says he's learned that anything from the British press has to be vetted first. This is about a Times of London report, quoting, by name, the head of MI6, Richard Dearlove, issued during the height of the British election, at which point neither the Prime Minister nor any of his minions denies the authenticity of the published memo. Yeah, gotta do some heavy vetting.

Why that and subsequent memos leaked out of Britain are, contrary to some of those editors' contentions, news is clear from the new batch published in the Los Angeles Times: in revisionist versions of the Iraq story, conservative opinionators now blame anti-war liberals for "obsessing" about the issue of WMDs. But here is British foreign secretary Jack Straw in March of 2002:

"Colleagues know that Saddam and the Iraqi regime are bad," he wrote. "But we have a long way to go to convince them as to: The scale of the threat from Iraq, and why this has got worse recently; what distinguishes the Iraqi threat from that of e.g. Iran and North Korea so as to justify military action; the justification for any military action in terms of international law; and whether the consequences really would be a compliant, law-abiding replacement government.

"Regime change per se is no justification for military action; it could form part of the method of any strategy, but not a goal," he said. "Elimination of Iraq's WMD capacity has to be the goal."

From another memo by an aide to Straw:

"Ricketts said that other countries such as Iran appeared closer to getting nuclear weapons, and that arguing for regime change in Iraq alone "does not stack up. It sounds like a grudge between Bush and Saddam."

Smackdown, baby.